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Syrian Electronic Army: A Brief Look at What Businesses Need to Know

The Syrian Electronic Army attacked again this week, compromising the websites of the New York Times, Twitter, the Huffington Post and others.

Political hacking isn't new. Hackers were breaking into systems for political reasons long before commerce and criminals discovered the Internet. Over the years, we've seen U.K. vs. Ireland, Israel vs. Arab states, Russia vs. its former Soviet republics, India vs. Pakistan and U.S. vs. China.

There was a big one in 2007, when the government of Estonia was attacked in cyberspace following a diplomatic incident with Russia. It was hyped as the first cyberwar, but the Kremlin denied any Russian government involvement. The only individuals positively identified were young ethnic Russians living in Estonia.

We saw this same tactic last year from Anonymous: hack around at random, then retcon a political reason why the sites they successfully broke into deserved it. It makes them look a lot more skilled than they actually are.

For the typical company, defending against these attacks doesn't require anything different than what you've been traditionally been doing to secure yourself in cyberspace. If your network is secure, you're secure against amateur geopoliticians who just want to help their side.